The Assassin (2015, Dir. Hou Hsiao-Hsien):
In the original story, the bluebird is a peacock, an exotic pet kept by the King of Jibing. Wishing it would sing, the Queen and King decide to place a mirror in front of it, hoping it might think its reflection was a companion who had come to visit. When it saw its own image, it began to sing out all its sadness until death came the next morning.
— Hou Hsiao Hsien
Cut him down for me expertly, as if he was a bird in flight.
— Jiaxin, The Assassin
The Assassin is a martial arts film in which not a drop of blood is spilled on screen, the fight choreography takes up about 4 minutes of the film’s 100-minute run time, and the titular assassin spends far more time waiting than killing. What else would you expect from Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Taiwan’s foremost director? For the duration of his long, storied career, Hou has never wavered in his focus: his films find the poetry in stillness like no one since Yasujiro Ozu, and he always twists genre situations into startling new shapes. City of Sadness is a historical epic that never wanders beyond the circle of a single family. Goodbye South, Goodbye is an absurdist comedy posing as a pulp gangster saga. Flowers of Shanghai is a costume drama that chronicles the end of a way of life within 30 shots. Now with The Assassin, he’s tackling the ever-popular wuxia genre for the first time, following in the hallowed footsteps of other big-name Chinese directors like Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), Zhang Yimou (Hero, House of Flying Daggers) and Chen Kaige (The Promise). Naturally, he goes his own way, with the usual unexpected, often brilliant results.
It is near the end of the Tang dynasty, with outer provinces such as Weibo threatening to go against the Emperor — so says the explanation at the beginning of the film (Hou notes it was placed there at the producers’ insistence, so audiences wouldn’t be totally lost), and be forewarned, you’re on your own from that point on. At first the story, based on a classical legend, is simplicity itself: Nie Yinniang (Shu Qi) is a young expert assassin trained by her aunt and princess-nun Jiaxin (Sheu Fang-yi) to do her bidding, which she does spectacularly well. But when she holds back from killing an official when she comes across him with his young son, Jiaxin castigates her (“Your heart lacks resolve”) and as penance, orders her to kill the rebellious ruler of Weibo, Lord Tian (Chang Chen), who also happens to be her cousin.
From there the plot grows ever more oblique as other characters, motivations and subplots come into play, like petals slowly unfurling after a storm. It turns out Lord Tian was originally betrothed to Yinniang, and when he was promised to another woman out of political expedience Yinniang became unruly, forcing her aunt Princess Jiacheng (Sheu Fang-yi again) to leave her in Jiaxin’s care. That’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the myriad relationships that drive the plot, where everyone is indebted or in servitude to everyone else, and duty and honor and loyalty hang around the characters’ necks, thick as a noose. Where a typical martial arts film would stir up all these ingredients into a fine froth, The Assassin lays back. As with most of Hou’s work, it has its own sense of time; when Yinniang returns to Weibo, a fragrant bath is prepared for her, and the finest robes are draped about her, and these scenes of domestic activity are drawn out for all they’re worth. This is a world in which ceremony is all, and court life is as restrictive as it is luxurious. Tian might be a target of assassination, but he’s more preoccupied with inner-circle intrigue, spending his time with favored concubine Huji (Hsieh Hsin-ying) while his wife (Zhou Yun) fumes and schemes. In another representative side-plot, Tian lets his mannered, glad-handing officials run the court, while the one minister who sincerely speaks his mind (Juan Ching-tian) is banished. It’s not a coincidence that in this back-stabbing world, the film’s biggest action beat (which occurs several times) is a character throwing a sword at another character’s back. Meanwhile, the near-mute Yinniang watches and waits, wraith-like, a ghost from the past undecided what she wants to do in the present, barely outlined by flickers of candlelight through rippling curtains. Most Hou Hsiao-Hsien movies luxuriate in stasis: this time, that stasis is pregnant with the promise of violence, as we await the next explosion of movement, however brief. When the explosions do occur, they’re underscored with insistent drum rhythms and nothing else, as if the action has been abstracted to its purest form, all whirls and slashes and tableaux, like bold ink strokes on a painting.
Stubbornly iconoclastic as always, Hou films The Assassin in the old-style 4:3 format, save for one gorgeous moment: a vision of Princess Jiacheng (Sheu Fang-yi again), Yinniang’s other aunt, surrendering herself to her fate as a prize bride as she plucks at her guzheng. It’s a brief passage, less than a minute in duration, yet it shadows the rest of the film, suggesting a peace in abnegation that the rest of the film’s characters struggle to find. The rest of the time, cinematographer Mark Lee Ping Bing, filming in Hubei province and Inner Mongolia, takes full advantage of the frame’s verticality, locating Yinniang and her prey under temple pillars, at the foot of jutting mountains, or in mist-shrouded forests. The autumnal settings enhance the belated mood of regret that hangs over the characters, as they grapple with the gulf between public and private appearance, obligation and desire. The film takes on a feminine (rather than feminist) point of view in its approach: the men flail and bellow in impotence while the women act, sacrifice, and mourn.
The Assassin is not an actors’ showcase — Shu Qi’s angular, wide-eyed beauty and Chang Chen’s spiky snarl function as colors in the film’s palette, suggesting states of being rather than fully fleshed characters. The actors speak in the classical guwen dialect, using simple words and phrases that hint at worlds of intent, and that style is distilled in the filmmaking. Chock full of elisions, the story grows more astringent as it goes: you might wonder who that masked assassin over there is, or what’s the exact connection between Tian’s wife and the wizardly crone who plots his concubine’s doom. Even if everything is not completely understandable, though, Hou’s delicate direction provides his own kind of explication. No doubt the original Chinese iteration of this tale has more to say about the mysterious woodsman (Satoshi Tsumabuki) who befriends Jianning and eventually offers her a path to salvation, but is there much more that needs to be said about their relationship than the wordless scene in which the woodsman tends to her wounds, the two of them enwrapped in firelight? Are mounds of backstory necessary to explain the connection between Yinniang and her father Nie Feng (Ni Dahong), who also happens to be Tian’s provost, when all you need is the painfully formal moment in which they both sit in a small hut, the gravely wounded Nie Feng sighing, “We never should have given you to that nun”? While the plot and Yinniang’s intentions become as cloudy as the fog that rolls over that spectacular mountaintop in which the film’s climax is located, the film’s emotional coherence is never in doubt.
“Your skill is matchless but your mind is still prone to human sentiment,” Jiaxin accuses her pupil during their final confrontation. By the time we’ve reached this point, Hou has achieved pure emotional release; we’ve become sensitized to the film’s rhythms, where the smallest gesture or a rustle of wind in the trees is like a thunderclap. As the plots and counter-plots fall away, we’re left with nothing but the characters’ bare yearning and desolation. Tian is stranded in his circumscribed world of courtly fin de siècle grandeur, surrounded by adulation but forever alone. Retreating to the rural life and the chance of a rebirth, Yinniang accompanies the woodsman and his fellow villagers to “the land of Shinru,” their party venturing towards the distant mountains, swallowed up by the mist. Like the conclusion of Millennium Mambo, one of Hou’s previous collaborations with Shu Qi, and many other entries in his filmography, the film finds its grace in the idea that one can walk on, freed from the demands of history. Kung fu junkies will no doubt be disappointed by the lack of fireworks and the reticence of the movie’s conclusion; for those familiar with Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s work, in which every ending is merely the uncertain dawning of a new day, The Assassin will satisfy as another standout entry in a unique filmmaking career.
